Alone among friends

Picture what you think buildings at Yale University look like: maybe stone gothic or colonial Georgian with beautiful fireplaces and snifters of bourbon.

Now picture what would happen if a fifth-grade boy was given a piece of graph paper and a protractor and told to design the world’s most elaborate ant farm, rampant with multilayer dead-end tunnels just to confuse the ants. Build a four-story mold from his model and fill it with wet concrete. Poke a couple of airholes in it for windows. Then spray it with mildew and Soviet malaise. That was my dorm for four years.

Author

Kat Banakis, a bivocational Episcopal priest, works as community connector at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, Illinois, as well as for a fund-raising consulting firm in Chicago. She is the author of Bubble Girl (Chalice Press).